Twenty Years of General Education in China: Progress,Problems, and Solutions

Abstract

General education is a subject with rich contents and that is highly contested in the field of higher education studies. It has been highly praised for its core concepts such as broad educational targets, liberating educational objectives, and balanced educational content. Looking back at the course of general education in China over the past 20 years we can find “top-down” cultural quality education (文化素质教育) and “bottom-up” general education (通识教育) have formed two stages with clear “characteristics,” with the first decade being mainly cultural quality education, and the most recent decade having had general education gradually enter the mainstream and reveal native qualityistics. This change has led the practice of general education to turn from being government led to university autonomy, and also reflects the increasing depth of Chinese exploration into general education. China’s practice of general education still faces problems with integrating major-based professional education and general education, and must adopt suitable solutions.     

劳动教育的文化研究

劳动教育是人改造外部世界,满足人的物质文化与精神文化需求,实现人的自由全面发展的文化实践。"劳动崇拜论""劳动决定论""劳动终结论"和"劳动起源论"批判和中外教育史上有关劳动教育的论争揭示了,文化是劳动和劳动教育的本质,劳动教育研究需要文化研究。"劳动""文化"和"教育"在词源上有共通之处。劳动教育,作为文化实践,是通过物质、能量转换改造自然的"化育"和通过信息、符号改造社会的"教化"的统一,蕴含价值-规范、行为-作用、语言-符号、知识-技术等不同的文化层级和实践综合。劳动教育有文化唯物性,也就是具有物质生产性和面向社会现实的大众文化性。劳动教育有文化启蒙价值,它是解放所有人的文化启蒙,是反映和表现社会生活文化的知识文化启蒙。总之,劳动教育的文化本质和实践充分呈现了人与自然、社会之间进行的物质、能量和信息转换,以及物质文化和精神文化创造的过程,是劳动的"教育性"与教育的"劳动性"、体力劳动教育与脑力劳动教育、化育与教化、精英与大众、理论与实践之间历史的、现实的、社会的辩证统一。     

Intercultural understanding through a ‘similar but different’ international teaching practicum

The ethnic and cultural diversity of many schools calls for teachers with well-developed intercultural understanding. Teacher education programmes have traditionally offered international fieldwork in bilingual settings to challenge ethnocentric attitudes to teaching. However, an international practicum in a ‘similar but different’ education system with English as the dominant language offers a different pathway, providing opportunities to deepen intercultural understanding and global education. This study investigates the impact of a three-week international teaching practicum in the American Midwest on two groups of Brisbane-based pre-service teachers in 2014 (n = 9) and 2015 (n = 4). Their reflective journals and reports indicate that international professional experience disrupts stereotypes and fosters global education and intercultural understanding. The paper presents key programme measures to promote intercultural understanding and concludes that the benefits of international teaching in a ‘similar but different’ education system are a nuanced understanding of cultural diversity and increased readiness for the classroom.     

Unexpected self-expression and the limits of narrative inquiry: exploring unconscious dynamics in a community-based digital storytelling workshop

In parallel with many nations’ education policies, national education policies in Australia seek to foster students’ intercultural understanding. Due to Australia’s location in the Asia-Pacific region, the Australian government has focused on students becoming “Asia literate” to support Australia’s economic and cultural engagement with Asian countries. Drawing on Allport’s optimal contact principles and key factors supporting intercultural understanding, this study examines two “sister school” cultural immersion trips in Indonesia and East Timor to explore ways in which their different approaches supported positive intergroup contact and helped foster intercultural understanding among students. Focus groups and interviews with school project teams and analysis of both researcher and teacher project field notes and documents suggested that these schools’ programmes could be mapped onto Allport’s contact principles in different ways. The paper concludes with promising approaches that can help to inform sister school programmes.     

Intercultural Competence: Physical Education Teacher Education Recommendations

ABSTRACT 

The increasing diversity of the K-12 student population presents challenges and opportunities for growth in the physical education profession. To address the cultural gap in today’s classroom, many people highlight the need to improve the intercultural competence of teachers. The focus of this article is to summarize the shifting demographics of American society, its impact on K-12 education, and how one California physical education teacher education (PETE) program is preparing pre-service teachers for the multicultural classroom. The article also outlines recommendations for PETE programs to address intercultural competence.     

‘Korea … it's not really actually an Asian country’: Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership programme

ABSTRACT

In Australia, intercultural understanding has been prioritised in education and curriculum documents at both federal and state levels. Alongside this educational priority, schools have also been encouraged to demonstrate ‘engagement’ with ‘Asia’, such as through a partnership with another school in the Asia-Pacific region. My research findings are based on an ethnographic study of Year 5 and 6 Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership initiative through on-line classroom exchanges over a two-year period. Through a critical analysis of ‘complexity reduction’ I draw attention to the processes through which children made sense of perceived racial and cultural differences as part of their involvement in partnership activities and conclude with some reflections on the extent to which educational initiatives such as intercultural school partnership programmes that aim to foster intercultural understanding can do so without reinforcing unequal intercultural relations and stereotypes.     

Homo pontem: teachers as bridges to a multicultural Italy

Abstract

This article explores the appearance of new teacher roles within the Italian education discourse, in particular focusing on official and scholarly texts from 1990 to 2015. During the second half of this period, the conceptual borders of two distinct roles, the intercultural teacher and the cultural mediator, begin to blur so that all teachers are called to engage in mediation. The role of mediator is made up of practices and dispositions intended to create a bridge between non-Italian students and Italian schools. The collapse of the teacher and mediator roles creates a new discursive context in which the Italian teacher is positioned to reconstitute her/himself through the adoption of these new practices and dispositions, thus constituting a new subjectivity. The new subjectivity, homo pontem, is in part an effect of political reasoning and the theorising of intercultural and citizenship education that has produced state-sponsored policies meant to manage immigrants in Italian schools. The Italian Ministry of Education first referred to intercultural education in 1990, marking a starting-off point for this study. Through a discourse analysis of ministerial documents and Italian scholarship, the overlapping of the roles of cultural mediator and intercultural teacher is tracked. The effect of this overlapping suggests the availability of new techniques of the self, with the Italian teacher called upon to engage in practices that facilitate non-Italian students’ integration, foster dialogue between cultures, and protect a new Italian way of being in today’s multicultural Italian nation-state.     

The Ethics of Intercultural Communication

Abstract

For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention. This article identifies two aporias in the discourse of intercultural communication (IC): first, that it contains an unstated movement towards a universal consciousness; second, that its claims to truth are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified.These features constitute IC discourse as ‘totality’, or as ‘metaphysics of presence’.The article draws on the work of Levinas (1969/2007, 1998/2009); and Derrida (1976, 1978, 1981, 1993) to propose more considered ethical grounds for intercultural praxis. Contra a Hegelian impetus towards universal consciousness,we posit an irreducible distance and separation between the self and other. In so doing, not only are we able to supersede the field’s implicit appeal to the transcendental as a source of truth but also to counter perceptibly ‘exorbitant’ claims and actions of the intercultural other. In this vein, the article proposes a discourse ethics of responsibility by which it still becomes possible for a critical intercultural praxis to make value judgements and to take potentially transformative action vis-à-vis cultural acts that challenge the limits of intercultural tolerance and hospitality.     

British Women Education Officers and progressive education for an independent Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three WEOs endeavoured to reconcile their British cultural values, progressive education, English language instruction, and the intricacies of Nigerian cultures in order to prepare students for life and work in an independent Nigeria. Their roles were diverse, encompassing administration and teaching, teacher education, and leadership of girls’ boarding schools and residential training colleges where English was the language of instruction. Following an outline of the WEOs’ prior experiences, I compare and contrast their approaches to progressive education, beginning with Clark’s endeavours to make girls’ education “a graft that would grow onto and into their own way of life” at the Women’s Training College, Sokoto, in far Northern Nigeria. Then I discuss Robinson’s work in a men’s elementary training college at Bauchi where she dispensed a “down-to-earth practical” progressive education to prospective primary school teachers. Finally, Player gave girls “as complete an education as possible for life as a worker, wife and mother” at Queen Elizabeth School, the first government secondary school for girls in Northern Nigeria. Each situation illustrates the complex social relations involved in realising WEOs’ commitments to progressive education as an emancipatory project.     

Reciprocal learning in teacher education between Canada and China

ABSTRACT

The Preservice Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Programme has been developed on a vision of bridging the East and West dichotomy by harmonising Eastern learning with Western knowledge. This programme is one of the two foundations for Xu and Connelly’s 7-year Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership in teacher education and school education in 2013-2020. The Programme, ‘provide[s] an exceptional cross-cultural experience with international engagement … to broaden teacher candidates’ horizons for a society of increasing diversity in today’s globalized world’. This article’s purposes are to discuss how reciprocal learning is both a concept and an approach for international and cross-cultural teacher education and school education and to present the learning outcomes and educational significance of the East-West reciprocal learning programme in teacher education. The Programme has created opportunities for both pre-service and in-service teachers to understand and appreciate a culture and educational system different from their own, thereby reciprocally contributing to educational opportunities for those they teach. The research theory and method utilised in this work are found in a companion paper in this special series and are briefly discussed below in the project overview and later in a discussion of student outcomes. This work has implications for other school settings where increasing immigrant student population and cultural diversity have become the norm.     

Learning through culture: seeking “critical case studies of possibilities” in the history of education

Abstract

In Radical Education and the Common School (2011), Michael Field and Peter Moss argue for a radical alternative to the failed and dysfunctional contemporary discourse about education and the school with its focus on markets, competition, instrumentality, standardisation, and managerialism. They argue that it is necessary, if we are to progress “social alternatives” in education, to construct micro-histories of schools that have developed as “real utopias” through radically revising their practice. They call these micro-histories “critical case studies of possibilities”. In To Hell with Culture (1963), the art educator and anarchist Herbert Read returned to a theme he had been exploring since the early 1930s – the purpose of education. For him, “education” implied many things, but he saw modern practice as “socially disintegrating”. Instead, Read offered an alternative to the dominant discourse about education under capitalism in the 1960s which would create “that collective consciousness which is the spiritual energy of a people and the only source of its art and culture”. To what extent was Read’s conception of education an ideal, a dream unfulfilled? Following Fielding and Moss this paper will seek to trace “critical case studies of possibilities” drawn from the past which reflect the fundamental connection identified by Read between school learning, “collective consciousness”, art, and culture.     

儿童立场 生活眼光 故事表达——“新东方1001夜”传统文化故事教育的架构与实施

"和"是中华传统文化的基本理念与核心,"美"是教育的品质与目标。普陀小学将"和美"作为学校鲜明的文化特色和个性形象,以"新东方1001夜"故事为载体,创新学习方式,致力于打造"一个有故事的学校",以"儿童立场生活眼光故事表达"为课程理念,通过学习文化故事,根据学生不同年龄、不同年级,梳理出不同的课程内容和目标要求,创新学习方式,开展丰富多彩的寓教于乐的主题教育活动,让传统文化焕发蓬勃的生命活力。     

The Physical Education System as a Consequential Social Determinant

ABSTRACT

Employing the ideal type of “The Physical Education System,” in this analysis I explore the import of systems frameworks for new institutional designs which hold promise for better outcomes. The inherited idea of a system is restricted to the relationship between teacher education and school programs. It draws on the developmental trajectory of the specialized field of study which pre-dated Kinesiology, and it conforms to the industrial age school, particularly its assumptions regarding standardized curricula, teachers’ roles, student classification, and cultural assimilation. When this inherited framework reigns, other key systems components (e.g., public policy, influential peer/family/community ecologies) get short shrift, important “outcome chains” are not addressed, and both Kinesiology’s and Public Health’s contributions are constrained. Once the inherited physical education system is recognized as a consequential social determinant of pediatric health and well-being, needs and opportunities for redesign become apparent.     

Reproducing,disrupting and reforming understanding of cultural diversity: theorising future subject teachers’ pedagogical reflections

Despite the growing demands for carrying out intercultural education as part of all teaching and learning, little attention has been given to the ways in which future subject teachers understand the meaning of ‘cultural diversity’ and how teacher education programmes prepare future teachers to consider intercultural aims in education. Therefore, this study investigates how future subject teachers, studying in an international teacher education programme in Finland, conceptualise the educational aims related to cultural diversity in reflective group discussions. For theorising the student teachers’ reflections, this study applies the idea of cultural reproduction depicted in the theory of communicative action by Habermas as an analytical framework for identifying how student teachers reach agreement or disagreement in issues regarding educational aims related to cultural diversity. This study identified three main forms of cultural reproduction from the student teachers’ discussions and showed that the underlying understanding about ‘cultural diversity’ and the educational aims related to it are in a state of disruption. This study highlights the need to clarify the theoretical concepts and aims used to guide intercultural education and to further emphasise issues of cultural diversity during teacher education. The findings are important for developing practices within subject teacher education internationally.     

Filmmaking education and enterprise culture: an ethnographic exploration of two filmmaking education contexts and their relation to bedroom culture and the creative workplace

ABSTRACT

Filmmaking education has never been firmly integrated into schooling and in past years has suffered from cuts to funding for formal and non-formal arts education and youth work. It continues to exist only by drawing on creative industry and cultural consumption practices as well as state funding. In this paper, we explore the filmmaking education contexts we encountered while doing our own pieces of year-long ethnographic research. These contexts import ‘enterprising’ ways of thinking, doing and being from the creative workplace and ‘bedroom culture’. Located across life’s domains, they address enterprising subjects who take pleasure in work, make use of leisure and are always learning. We argue that these filmmaking education contexts support young people to develop their private creative practice and introduce them to the possibility of work in the creative industries but, because of the enterprise culture in which they are entangled, uncritically address these young people as enterprising subjects.     

Taiwanese higher education in a cultural perspective: a preliminary study of two premier universities

ABSTRACT

Imposing the policy lessons from higher-performing countries may involve the complex interplays of socio-cultural and institutional contexts. This article attempts to observe Taiwan’s progress in higher education from an explicit cultural perspective. It locates Taiwan among the rising group of higher education systems in East Asia. The study interrogates a wide-held understanding of higher education development and critically reflects on the “high performances” at systemic and institutional levels. It re-examines a capacity of the Western-influenced system in preserving indigenous cultural traditions while pursuing the quest for world-class status. Adopting a case study research, data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with executives and academics at two premier universities in Taiwan. The findings have shown that, due to fundamental differences, integrating traditional values with imported Western-structured institutions remains an arduous task for Taiwanese higher education. This study critiques conventional presumptions concerning the primacy of an Anglo-Saxon model in Taiwan and offers insights into the society’s efforts to bring back its own cultural values.     

The educationalising of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand: tracking “free play” 1940s–2010

Abstract

Geographically isolated in the south-west Pacific but intellectually and culturally connected to Western Europe, Aotearoa New Zealand’s early childhood education sector is a unique mix of influences. The imprint of progressive education is evident in a legacy of “free play” programmes, yet its national curriculum is built on the construct of “mana”, reflecting the cosmology and aspirations of the indigenous Māori people. These influences are held in tension with contemporary economic drivers to expand the sector and to focus on politically approved “learning outcomes”. Within this dynamic tension, the place of play and of “free play” is paradoxically both visible and invisible both in the education of very young children, and also in teacher education. This study draws on oral history interviews that focused on “free play” across 60+ years. The analysis of these indicates a process of “educationalisation” evident across three “reform agendas”: Play, Unity, and Education.     

Legacies of empire: from the “religions of China” to the “Confucian heritage” learner

ABSTRACT

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as “Confucian Heritage” learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West and civilised and yet authoritarian East. In mapping the deployment of such heuristic in the management of international affairs during and after historical colonialism, we moreover demonstrate how the derivative characterisation of international students as “rote”, “dependent”, and inherently “prone to plagiarism” learners has been used to explain racism without race – that is, the epistemic exclusion of international students as a matter caused by factors other than race: lack of socially relevant cultural skills and communication barriers.     

Ethnically Speaking ... The post‐migration divide and educational perspectives in Sicilian family life stories

The decades following the mass migration of Italians and their cultural traditions to Australia during the 1950s and 1960s witnessed an increase in research concerning second generation cultural minorities and the role they maintain as “bridges” between two divergent cultures. Ideas of cultural duality and conflict stand in opposition to notions of cultural synthesis, and at times, have served to blur the lived experiences of this group. To compound this problem, much of the research in this field has focused on the adolescent experience, therefore denying an insight into those “lived experiences” of the adult. The effect of this focus has been the negation of the historical specificity that applies to a generation that has reached adulthood as “second generation Italian ethnics” in Australia. Through a comparison of women's life stories, as told by female cousins in both Sicily and Australia, this paper aims to explore women's perceptions and experiences of their schooling. Their accounts reveal a sense of “connectedness” and a delicate balancing in their concepts of family, culture and educational experience. Equally important is an exploration of the intersection of ethnicity and education to enable a better understanding of schooling at an experiential level both among second generation Sicilian women in Australia and Sicilian women in Italy. Through such a comparison, the relationship between ethnicity, education and generation can be further explored.

     

校史传统文化增强大学文化建设之探讨——以福建工程学院“走进林纾”课程设置为例

林纾是福建工程学院前身校的创办人之一,以林纾的文化遗产设置校本课程“走进林纾”,是利用校史文化进行大学文化建设的有益尝试,是福建省首门以校史资源为基础开设的传统文化人文素质教育课程。该课程的设置,立足于林纾的文化研究,在课程规划、课程体系建设、教学方法创新、师资培养、教材建设以及以教学促进科研方面做了诸多探索与实践,这对了解、继承中华民族优秀传统文化,提高大学生人文素质都具有重要意义。该课程的开设是对传统文化的创新性传承与创造性发展的有益探索,也是工科院校大学文化建设与大学生人文素质教育相结合的有益尝试。